>A large demographic of attendees shifted hard to the left, mirroring our culture in general.

I had always identified hacker culture as principally left. Maybe the US is specifically different.

Hacker culture is principally 'don't tell me what to do'.

Which in the US puts it somewhat orthogonal to the left-right divide.

It mirrors the divide on the public at large - a disappointingly large number of people are wildly ready to jump on the authoritarian bandwagon, because the alternative has a few leftist ideas that make them feel icky.

	▲	joquarky 5 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		If I had a debug console on reality, I'd be curious to query how big the intersection is between those who thrive in hacker culture and people with PDA. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pathological_demand_avoidance
	▲	graemep an hour ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Interesting. In the UK it tends to be right wing ideas people find icky about the alternative. Maybe one party on the left but it is really small. The problem here is that society and culture in general has got more authoritarian so it cut across the left-right divide (which IMO has got meaningless anyway since it no longer reflects a consistent difference in economic policy) but leaving the non-authoritarians practically without politically representation.

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chrisco255 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

The left used to be more individualist in the U.S. (circa 90s most definitely) but it developed a toxic groupthink as it came to dominate pop culture and media in the 00s and 10s, and began to leverage that to employ censorship, deplatforming, doxxing, etc and it became incredibly dogmatic and if anyone diverged from a particular narrative (ie skeptical covid came from wet market), they would be ridiculed, shouted down, laughed off, shamed, kicked off social media platforms, ostracized, etc which is cult like behavior.

The left of the 90s would have never stood for that. They were the die hards for free speech then. Something shifted.

	▲	immibis 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Yeah, the left of the 90s would never excommunicate anyone for being completely certain Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, and that climate change was a hoax, and the moon was made of cheese, and bringing these things up at every opportunity, because the left of the 90s believed in free speech.

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billy99k 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

During Covid, many of the Hackers in the infosec community supported government-mandated vaccination (this was what I saw through Twitter). I think this changed my view of activists and hackers after this.

It's authoritarian-minded people that don't want to listen to anyone (and want to force you to do what they want through hacking). When they get want they want, they don't care about trampling on the rights of or oppressing the people that disagree.

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saagarjha 3 hours ago | parent [-]

It’s shocking to me that people whose job is to find and fix vulnerabilities would support vaccinations!

	▲	graemep an hour ago \| parent [-]
		He did say "government mandated". It is perfectly possible to think people should have vaccinations (I did - and had them myself) without thinking the government should force them to have vaccinations.